Sections

Halo 5: Guardians: The developers tells us how beta data will help shape the game's future

Halo 5: Guardians' multiplayer beta will play a significant role over the course of the next year of the game's development process. Photo: 343 Industries

Patrick O'Rourke

Published: February 5, 2015 - 1:03 PM

Updated: February 5, 2015 - 4:14 PM

With Halo 5: Guardians, 343 Industries has taken on the difficult task of modernizing the Halo franchise, in the process forcing the studio to revamp a number of the series’ aging features, while still keeping the essence of what has become one of gaming’s most popular and influential first-person shooter franchises.

Trying to appease Halo’s dedicated, hardcore fans is an important part of 343 Industries’ development process, and something both Halo 5’s executive producer, Josh Holmes, and the game’s multiplayer designer, Quinn DelHoyo, feel the beta has helped accomplish, given the final version of the game likely won’t be released until approximately a year from now.

The data, criticism, and experimentation present in the beta has allowed 343 Industries to explore a number of new methods when it comes to pushing the franchise forward, and there’s still plenty of time for the studio to tweak the experience they’re creating.

“We really focused on putting the gameplay through its paces, and testing out the new Spartan abilities that are at the centre of the gameplay for Halo 5: Guardians. We were interested to see how people reacted to the abilities, and to see how the balance of those abilities played out in the wild. There was a gammut of everything we looked at, from weapon layout on maps, to weapon tuning and how various weapons are balanced against one another, making sure players couldn’t dominate with a single weapon,” said Holmes.

DelHoyo expanded on Holmes’ statement, explaining one of his team’s big takeaways from the beta was gauging how well its new features and balancing tweaks mesh together. In terms of significant takeaways from the beta, Holmes explained player visibility in certain arenas, as well as map layout, are significant issues his team plans to address.

“We’re even looking at, ‘Okay, this area has five entry points, maybe we should remove one of those entry points to give you a little bit more of a flow to the experience, to find the threats a little bit more,’ and have some interesting choke points; because some of the matches, I mean, people were like electrons. It was really hard to predict where people are going,” said DelHoyo.

When the beta launched, many longtime fans of the series were shocked to discover the ability to run was no longer limited as it had been in past Halo titles such as Halo: Reach and Halo 4, speeding up the game’s pace significantly. To offset the effectiveness of being able to constantly sprint, 343 Industries implemented a unique system preventing player’s shields from recharging until they stopped moving. But even with this gameplay mechanic, many hardcore fans still felt the beta was too fast when compared to past Halo titles.

“That’s something we went back and forth on as a team, as we do on most core decisions related to gameplay. I think for the beta we really focused on the arena portion of the experience, but as with past Halos, it’s important for us to have a consistency in the gameplay speed between all different modes.

We certainly don’t want to take away old comfy pillows like that from players

“So as you can imagine, we’re building a foundation of gameplay that translates over to the other larger experiences we have planned for multiplayer, that we haven’t revealed yet, as well as our campaign. So we’re trying to find the balance within the mobility that works well for all of these different modes,” said Holmes.

“I think some of the criticism of having that limitation mechanic is linked to the lack of predictability [it would cause] – how much sprint you can have at a given time. If you went to sprint and then run-out unexpectedly, and the frustration that causes with players.”

Halo 5: Guardians is the next title in Microsoft’s flagship Halo franchise. [343 Industries]

DelHoyo also explained in order for sprint to perform properly if it were limited, 343 Industries would need to add another indicator to Halo 5’s already crowded heads-up-display (HUD), potentially causing visibility issues for players. Holmes also linked the infinite run feature to his team’s goal of ensuring player mobility is a main focus of the game.

“Mobility has been such a core focus of the team from the beginning for Halo 5: Guardians, even while we were still working on Halo 4, a lot of the ideas that inspired that foundation of spartan abilities, just knowing that we wanted to focus on creating a more mobile experience, and kind of getting that into the core capabilities and abilities that you have as a Spartan on the battlefield,” said Holmes.

Aiming-down-sights (ADS) has also been drastically changed in Halo 5 from how the feature performed in previous Halo titles, from the way it is controlled (with the left trigger) to how many weapons feature zoom capabilities. Each weapon, even guns focused on close-quarters and mid-range combat, can be zoomed in Halo 5, causing some weapons to become ineffective due to the limited viewing area this feature creates – particularly when it comes to the assault rifle. This lead many players to question why 343 Industries made the decision to give every weapon featured in the a Call of Duty-like left-trigger ADS zooming, instead of limiting it to guns like the Sniper Rifle, Battle Rifle and Pistol, similar to past Halo games.

“I think any time you take a franchise that has such a storied history like Halo and you want to evolve the gameplay experience, there’s always that challenge of having more traditionalist fans, and whether they’re going to accept some of the changes. For us, we wanted to create a mechanic that felt natural within the first play, that would allow us to provide more functionality to all weapons across the sandbox. The way that we presented it, it was kind of getting back to the fiction of the smart-link the Spartan has between the visor and heads-up display built into their armour, and how that connects to the weaponry… Again, it was one of those things that we wanted to see how people responded to in the beta,” said Delhoyo.

The ground pound is another controversial spartan ability that, according to Holmes, will likely be tweaked on some level before the game’s final release next year. Player reaction to the new ability has largely been mixed, with many players either loving or hating being able to powerfully drop on foes from above.

“During the development process, we prototyped a ton of different mechanics. Some of them stick, some of them don’t. That was one of the ones that at first it seemed a little bit crazy, but the more we played with it, it became a natural part of the rhythm of combat and was one of those punctuation moments that has a lot of risk/reward to it,” DelHoyo said.

“We weren’t settled on it either, I mean that’s why we did the beta,” interjected Holmes.

“It was great to get data on it, and look at how people are using it. But are they using it how they thought they’d be using it? So we’re really excited how Ground Pound turned out but we’re not resting on our laurels. I think we’re going to tune it because it kind of interferes with the flow older school players like, with crouch jumping, jumping in the air to get high levels. We certainly don’t want to take away old comfy pillows like that from players,” said Holmes.

Moving forward, the next step for 343 Industries is to continue Halo 5’s development, using the data the studio has gathered from the game’s early beta. Holmes explained there are a number of things his team is still not happy with and that the beta has given 343 Industries valuable insight in terms of what needs to be changed in order to move the game’s development forward.

The beta ran from Dec. 29, 2014 through to Jan. 18, 2015. The game is set to be released at some point in late 2015 or early 2016 for Microsoft’s Xbox One.

Below is a full list of the changes coming to Halo 5 as a result of data pulled from the game’s beta.

Abilities

Increase base speed (faster base movement)

Increase strafe acceleration (faster, more responsive strafing)

Reduce top sprint speed (narrow the delta between base movement and sprint)

Weapons

Sniper Rifle: improve scope experience to making it less “clunky” and faster to scope in

DMR: adjust position of the scope to improve visibility

Bring back the SPNKr Rocket Launcher as a legendary version of the weapon

Reduce bonuses for automatic weapons in Smart-Link & w/ headshots

Remove grenade detonation in mid-air based on weapon fire

Ability to turn on/off vibration feedback for weapons

General tuning and bug fixing for all weapons

Presentation

Post-death replay: this will become an opt-in feature. After death, players will see a traditional follow-cam and have the option to view a replay of their death from the killer’s perspective (as long as the feature is enabled within the playlist)

Medals: decrease frequency and number of medals displayed in the medal feed

Spartan chatter: players will have the option to turn this on or off in the settings menu

Adding highlights to placed/dropped weapons to make them easier to see

General tuning for announcer and Spartan chatter to reduce the frequency of events and focus on the information that matters most to players